Great Dads of the Seventies #13: Jack Nicholson in THE DEPARTED

Just because THE DEPARTED doesn't really seem to occur in the 1970s doesn't mean Nicholson's amazing performance as the Irish criminal top dog villain, Frank Costello, doesn't count. Nor doesn't it count just because Jack isn't really a father to either Matt Damon of Leo DiCaprio in the film. The facts are in, first of all Jack is SO MUCH like my own dad used to be (in the 1970s) here that he instantly heads the A-list of cinema dads, period. Let's look at some of the traits:

1. A dad to all needy children, not just his own: A good 1970s dad is just that, a dad to all. Nicholson sticks up for abused choir boys (by telling off a priest), encourages his boys to go to college ("Maybe one day you'll wake the fuck up," he tells a goofily "faux-macho" Leo), gives good presents and praise ("You earned it," he tells Matt who gazes on some big ticket gift --rolex?--when he graduates into the staties). And so forth.
2. A wicked sense of humor (racist, perhaps, sexist, but deliberately enjoying and aware of the wrongness of it, the relic of a bygone era and he knows it, and is not afraid to trumpet his own offensive horn).
3. A large appetite for women, booze and cigarettes (he doesn't bother to curb his habits in front of the kids, nor in anyway put on fronts of hypocritical posturing)
4. The ability to intimidate via voice and attitude alone. (If he raises his voice, people listen, because he sounds like he will fuck you up and not give a shit, and that's enough most of the time)

Right on! Favorite moments include Nicholson's loving look at his right hand man, Mr. French, when he says "Arthur, you're one in a million") ("Ten," Arthur replies. "Ten million.") and his interplay with Damon at the X-rated theater (see above), wherein Matt reports "I have to find myself," to which Jack quips "Oh, you're telling me, Sonny boy!" ... there's a constant sense of menace radiating off the old man, and it gives the jokey interplay throughout the film an edge of tough reality. A good 1970s dad loves you in a way that's just a little scary - I don't mean pedophile or abuse scary, I mean scary in a little kid whose cheek is reddened by a sweep of the old man's whiskers for a goodnight kiss, the taste of whiskey and cigarettes emanating from it - thrilling in its sensory overload - too rough, too strong, too everything, for comfort.

You might be a little afraid of him, but you're sure as hell not afraid of anything else if he's around.

The Greg Kinnear-style 2008 super-dad of sensitive indie cinema by contrast is more like a co-dependent guidance counsellor. You live in the shadow of his weakness; his terror is that he will lose you or you will no longer love him... he's "trying" to be a good dad. But he doesn't see how he puts all this pressure on you as the kid to justify this attention, to warrant his sacrifice of his own destiny.

A 1970s dad will always put himself first, presuming you are not in physical danger that is--he may dive off a cliff to save you, but won't even stir from his easy chair if you are just crying and moaning for no reason up in your room. Without that sort of benign indifference how would you ever learn to be independent? How would you know that eventually you would stop crying on your own; that you'd be okay even if no one came? That's the most important realization of a young person's life and nowadays they are more and more winding up in rehab because they never learned it.

So, the 1970s Dad society salutes Jack Nicholson, the embodiment of that hedonistic intellectual charismatic devil who follows his own drummer and expects all his kids to do the same.

JPL is RIP

If you’re a fan of the films of Otto Preminger, Roger Corman, or Mario Bava – or, like me, all three – you will be saddened to learn of the death earlier this week of John Phillip Law, who was an iconic presence in the films of all three directors.

For Preminger, he played a poor white farmer in Hurry Sundown (1967), and an acid-dropping hippie in Skidoo (1968).

For Corman, he played the symbol of Germany’s best, Baron von Richtofen, supplanted by Germany’s worst, the Nazis, in Von Richtofen and Brown (1971). He also appeared memorably for another Roger – Vadim – as the blind angel Pygar in Barbarella (1968).

Equally iconic, if not more so, was his appearance as the jumpsuit-clad comic book villain Diabolik in Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik (also 1968, above).

For a far more detailed consideration of Law’s legacy, see Tim Lucas’s Video Watchblog here and here.

The Morphology of Mojo

The New York Times, out to prove that it can still rock your world, cranks out a trés fabulous neo-geological time chart of boxoffice receipts from 1986 to the present. The graphic, which looks like striated taffy, is color-coded to show each film’s total receipts. And it's even adjusted for inflation! Height shows weekly receipts, while length reveals whether a film had legs. I’m not sure if I believe all I see, though. Did Gangs of New York (Dec. 2002) really open bigger than Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers? Anyway, check it out.

Bright Lights Film Journal 60 posted

Issue 60 of Bright Lights Film Journal just went live.

from the editor

Our bad!

features foyer

Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game Reconsidered — Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?

Twenty-One Years in the Midday Sun: Revisiting Roger Ebert's Cannes — Here's lookin' at you, Roger

articles antechamber

What's Your Function? How Movies Are Made — You mean you've tried panicking?

One Culture, Two Systems: The Rules of Spanglish and Twice Upon a Time — "When talking to others, what needs to be articulated?"

Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hollywood Myth — On the manifest destiny of Civil War tricksters and gun-slinging corpses

Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grand Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures — "To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it's a physiological act, it's urban guerrilla" — Marco Ferreri

Serpentine Evil and the Garden of Eden in DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) — Samson, meet Adam; Delilah, meet Eve

cellar of silence

Looking at Charlie — The Circus: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin — Life in the ring

recent cinema roundabout

Critics Cornered: On Reviewers' Reactions to David Ayres' Street Kings — "Anyone who speaks unsanitized thought is going to lose."

the empty guest room

Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame — "I'm a girl who loves to be manhandled! After all, what are a few contusions or abrasions if you get the man you love?" — Gloria Grahame, 1953

interrogation alcove

Birds Do It, Bees Do It: Isabella Rossellini Talks About Bug Sex, Human Sex, and Green Porno — "A laugh and information!"

From a Line of Ancestors: Talking with Doris Dörrie and Natasha Arthy — "We in the West trample on them."

A Quiet Storm: Charles Burnett on Namibia and His Post-Killer of Sheep Career — "Each film requires for me its own approach."

Man with a Movie Camera: Visiting Jonathan Caouette — "I could somehow control my own story"

documentary dormer

What's Up, Docs? Nonstandard Operating Procedures in Recent Documentaries, and Interviews with Patricio Henriquez and Doug Pray — "Why didn't you just stick to the truth?"

there will be blood, and more blood

Bowling for America: Robert Warshow, There Will Be Blood, and the Topography of Desire — "The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist. But the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it." — George Gordon, Lord Byron

The Human Monster: On Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood — "There are no good and bad men, there are only damaged men . . ."

vale of video

Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó — "Jancsó's controlled aesthetic acts as a dissonance that vibrates expressively with scenes of violence, torture, and shame."

film festival flying buttress

Plus Ça Change: The 2008 Rendez-vous with French Cinema — Gingerly moving out of the 20th century, not quite into the 21st

bright sights

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Harry Langdon: Lost and Found, Postwar Kurosawa, I Am Cuba, The Dragon Painter, The Wrath of the Gods, Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema — An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

hiding in the stacks

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris

Mother's Day Salute to Cinematic Blonde Moms... of DEATH!

It's mother's day and as I was watching MULHOLLAND DRIVE just now for the millionth time, it occured to me that my love for cinema would not be nearly so fierce if not for my own mother was not a natural blonde, Swedish to be precise, and if you don't know what that means, it's a mix of tenderness and disinterest, the teutonic fire that burns not out nor warm nor long... and it's what cinema is! For psychological subtext there's Hitchcock and Lynch - Naomi Watts, the mother of mirrors hallucinating in her dirty bathrobe while we hover as camera lens ghosts at her hem line, or Marnie in PSYCHO or Melanie in THE BIRDS, creating this sense of unfulfillable longing-- we can never please her so we spend our lives creating shadow plays to distract ourselves... stuffing birds... a curious hobby, and not as expensive as you'd think, until they attack everyone as manifestations of Jessica Tandy's ferocious id. Imagine an Oscar clip montage devoted to psychotic moms! All sharp instruments and flashing blue eyes... cans of soup on the stove, Ultra-Man on the TV, a vague sense of doom, comfort, coziness and futility all commingling in your pre-school genius mind.

So without further ado... five great blonde mothers in five great films:

2. Michelle Pfeiffer in WHITE OLEANDER -- aka Hannah Belle Lechter, mom kills a boyfriend and later drives her daughter's step mom to suicide with just a few well placed words, all from the cozy confines of her prison. In one of her giddy pieces of praise for this pic, Kim Morgan writes: ""We're not like that. We're the Vikings," says sociopathic blonde mother Michelle Pfeiffer to her crying teenage daughter Alison Lohman in White Oleander. One of cinema's great blonde-semble pieces, this melodrama is supposed to be, in part, about the foster-care system, but Oleander really shows the varied, sometimes insane incarnations of blonde womanhood. (read full article here.) In a different piece praising Pfeiffer's best roles, Morgan notes: "By artfully melding her gorgeous Grace Kelly qualities with the cold eyes of a Ted Bundy, Michelle creates a classic performance for a real "Woman's Picture." (read that one here.

3. Liv Ullmann/Bibi Andersson in PERSONA - The poor bespectacled son can't even make it out of the morgue of pre-egoic identification to be with his mom in this nutty gem from the Great Swede himself, Ingmar Bergman. While the son resides in some bizarre synaptical cine-womb, ever reaching for her projected image, Liv prefers to merge vampirically with the blank hotness of Bibi Andersson (pictured below, with glasses off). Mirror these two up to Betty and Diane in MULHOLLAND and you got yourself a four-way trip to the bughouse of the pre-differentiated self. Incidentally, of all these blondes, Andersson is the one I am most attracted to and yet she also is the one who most resembles my mom. For what it's worth, maybe too much information for you... I'm just throwing that in the stew for extra frisson.

5. Leopoldine Constantin in NOTORIOUS. The old school hausfrau to a Nazi son (Claude Rains) with bad taste in women, Frau Constantin is willing to stay in the background as a stock character, but when Rains finds out he's "married to an American agent!" he knows he can relax, as his mom sheds her homey front with a sigh, like a wolf grateful to cast off its sheep's clothing and feel its fur in the wind again. Lighting a cigarette, Rains' mom paces back and forth puffing tobacco and forming a diabolical plan. For her, the chance to plot the slow accidental death of her daughter-in-law is like the sudden arrival in the mail of a juicy book of sidoku would be to my own mother.

4. Cheryl Ladd in POISON IVY. As the grandly dying mom up in her red silk bedroom, cringing at the touch of her ugly duckling daughter (Sarah Gilbert), Ladd is great in a weird role that she pulls off with aplomb. The movie would have been perfect anyway, as it's got Tom Skerritt as the alcoholic dad, sneaking vodka shots out of the kitchen cupboard after realizing he's fooled around with his daughter's blonde nymphette friend (Drew Barrymore), but then Ladd comes along as the icing on the cake, clutching this homewrecking hottie to her chest like Cleopatra with an asp.

1. Natasha Henstridge in SPECIES! This mom is the ideal for both humans and H.R. Giger-designed aliens. I've written extensively about my love for Henstridge in an article for Acidemic on one of my favorite films of all time, GHOSTS OF MARS. I also discuss SPECIES, noting that Henstridge "played Syl, an alien/human hybrid who escapes her medical lab upbringing and hunts for a "breeder" partner, to mate with, mantis-like. Thanks to Henstridge's startling beauty and sex appeal, this death/re-birth by vagina dentata becomes horribly desirable. A femme fatale with no pretense of not killing you, but so hot you can't resist. Her allure is thus now and forever linked to the key Freudian primordial fantasy -- to die and be reborn into a nicer mom's womb, to move from outside the screen to inside the actress. This is the death drive’s actual goal realized via cinema, and she is its ultimate goddess, the modern Kali, ripping your heart out with one hand, and pulling you out of the void into life with the other." (read the rest of this crazed rant here). So... Syl has Alfred Molina's baby mere minutes after fucking him, running off to an underground oil well to do so. Granted the bastard gets fried by flame throwers... oh wait, how bad does the climax of this movie suck? Pretty badly. The trick is to drink lots of vodka during the first hour and a half, so that by the time the underground cavern climax rolls around, you're passed out cold. Then when you wake up, just press play and watch from the beginning, that way the film goes on forever in a weird version of the mobius strip called "quantum immortality."

Of course there are great moms of death who aren't blonde too. I'd like to give a shout out to Asia Argento (HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS), Kate Hepburn in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, and of course, Mrs. Bates... Happy Mother's Day!

Notes from the Tribeca Film Festival Underground

This Tribeca Film Festival is on, and I live on 12th St. and 2nd Ave, across the street from one and a block away from another theaters at which it was being held, so I am hereby appointing myself Bright Lights After Dark's accidental man on the scene!

SATURDAY - 8 AM-- Still awake after an all night video editing session, I go outside to score some diet Pepsi and there, chipper as can be, are about 8 volunteer intern-ushers standing around in the dead middle of the empty sidewalk, with their laminates and clipboards, surveying the long rows of cold gray metal ticket line dividers across the street from my door. They're looking at me as if I'm trying to grab a comp ticket to the new Guy Maddin flick. Dudes, no one is on the street! Your gray line dividing stalls are empty. Now give me a fuckin' comp ticket to the new Guy Maddin...

Tribeca Film Festival is just awash in Am Ex sponsorship, oh and some idiotically pretentious beer whose name I am proud to say they've failed to make stick in my head. Stella Artois? D'oh! This beer is so pretentious that the bartender will stop the train just to pour it off the tap without too much foam. Target demographic? ex-frat boy Wall Streeters still wet behind the ears. What do they have to do with cinema? Promoters clearly don't know how to "brand" this film festival so it becomes an extension of the whole cigars-steaks-sports-American Psycho aesthetic.

SATURDAY - 2 PM -- After a long nap, I go out to buy cigarettes. My neighborhood, Manhattan's East Village, once a haven for weird artist types, has become a combination NYU campus and Asian ex-pat drinking ground. Now I know how the Parisians must have felt when they had Earnest Hemingway and F. Scott lording it around back in the 1920s, flush with exchange rate relative wealth. I feel like some crying Native American watching the litter along the highway.

The question is, what are all these bleached Midwestern tourists doing this far down from Times Square? Suddenly it hits me like the cold rush off a dirty crack pipe: Am Ex and that stupid beer have turned Tribeca Film Festival into a tourist attraction, ala Mardi Gras, "jazz fest" and-- not long from now I imagine--Burning Man. Dudes! Can you imagine soccer moms with five kids and their same-aged best friends (they all get to bring one along-- so ten kids total) all clinging to each other and treating each new environment as if another new store at the local mall as they walk through Burning Man, or like, 1970 Altamont? Oh Hell's Angel's dagger, where is thy sting?

Don't these tourists realize that you can't just "see" the festival? You have to pick your movies wisely and the good ones are sold out by the director's friends six days before you get there? Hmmm, maybe they're the relatives of the film crews on these "underdog" indies. Either way, I just don't get it. Most of the stuff on the roster is usually unsigned for a reason. Some are great, most are padded shorts seething with unconscious film grad misogyny.

Now it's Wednesday, another beautiful gray dawn... and still the volunteers in the laminates stand awaiting... waiting for their stalls to be filled. And me, I'm just an ordinary guy on his way to his ordinary job, who just happens to be living right across the street... just one of five million stories in the naked city.

Walt & Annie & Julianne

Continuing her series of commissions for the Walt Disney megacorp, Annie Leibovitz photographs Julianne Moore as The Little Mermaid.

Somewhere, Hans Christian Anderson is smiling.

[Thanks to Nathaniel R for the tip.]

Hillary & Kumar Escape From Baby Obama Mama

Sometimes it seems like the question frequently posed by the media, "Who is more electable, Hillary or Obama?" is simply code for asking, "Is America more sexist, or more racist?"

This weekend we may have a chance to find out. Two comedies are opening - one, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, starring two Non-White Americans, and the other, Baby Mama, starring two Non-Male Americans. I daresay whichever movie motivates more people to leave their homes to buy tickets might be a good indicator of which candidate will motivate more voters to show up at the polls.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

It is an Ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three.`By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

If I were a cartoonist, i.e., if I could actually draw, I’d love to publish a political cartoon depicting Navy man John McCain as Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”

And who would I depict as the Albatross around his neck?

Why George W. Bush, of course!

Then again, how many people these days have read Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Probably just the “educated elite” who are going to vote for Obama anyway. Oh well.

[Engraving by Gustave Doré.]

Happy 80th Birthday, Shirley Temple!

Shirley Temple, the Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (Salvador Dalí, 1939).

See also, Graham Greene on Shirley Temple - via David Ehrenstein here.

Take this unborn child and shove it!

Is it just me or is there a distinctly pro-life vibe seeping into our once so "liberal" cinema? This JUNO business has all us population control enthusiasts worried sick, and now LIFE BEFORE HER EYES profers the notion that the best way to atone for an abortion is by sacrificing yourself in a Columbine-style massacre. The word "slut" is used in the film as a cross of light that leads Wood to realize the one who needs to survive is the fundamentalist virgin gal pal not her pot-smokin' free-lovin' self. Oops, did I spoil the ending? I could be wrong, but the one bumper sticker in the film conspicuously reads "Choose Life." Uma Thurman is the older version of the sinner lady, and Evan Rachel Wood is the younger. Both are magnifique! But oh brother.

The movie itself is quite well-done in its nonlinear fashion. The editor has a field day slowing down the speed as Wood dives into pool after pool, her hair slowly undulating in the clear blue water. Her lithe body in red bikini taut in her dive, arms akimbo in eternal crucifixion stance. It's a fine old high school chick version of JACOB'S LADDER, but the pro-life sediment never really settles to the bottom, leaving a weird haze over everything. Am I too quick to smell the dystopian HANDMAID'S TALE-style neo-con funded backwards slide into female oppression taking root, as it always does, in our cinema? Am I as foolish in wanting to protect our women from slavery as they are foolish in presuming that smother-love is at all ennobling? Self-denial is, in the end, always the grossest form of indulgence. The only truly free spirit in the film, the young daughter (Gabrielle Brennan) laughs in mama Uma's face for being so martyr-ish and worried all the time. It's a cool scene, as the film is clearly divided as to whether Uma's skittish mom is right or not to fear losing her perfect little small-town grip, but it ultimately can't atone for the sinister subtext.

Adding to the unsettling sense of foreboding, one of the previews before LIFE was for THEN SHE FOUND ME, a Helen Hunt vehicle where she's pregnant though looks like she's pushing 50 and miserable and pinched you sense the kid cringing in the corner a priori to even being born. The issue is not her health or her deep-set frown lines, but the fact she really loves "perfect man" Colin Firth but its slovenly Matthew Broderick's baby. As in the odious STEEL MAGNOLIAS, it's the child that comes first; moms don't mind sacrificing themselves if it means their man can have a little baby to look after with their new, younger wife. In fact it only increases their value in the eyes of God... and Oscar.

Far more inspiring was THE FALL preview, about a man who tells psychedelic bedtime stories to a little girl in exchange for opiates. They show more rapport in their couple of seconds worth of exchanges than all the hand-wringing worrying mommyhoods and daddynesses in all the rest of this namby pamby stuff out there. I'm not saying drugs make you bond better with your kids, only that no kid likes a parent to be a whining, over-protective martyr. Cinema, give us back our 1970s dads!

Hazel Court (1926-2008)

Most fondly remembered for the two films she did for Terence Fisher - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) - and the three films she did for Roger Corman - Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963, above), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). This stunning English redhead was sometimes cast as a villainess, but was at her most striking as an icon of mature sexuality offered in contrast to a more "innocent" ingenue. That was precisely the role she played in her finest film, The Masque of the Red Death, as consort to Prince Prospero (Vincent Price), threatened by the arrival of young Jane Asher, another redhead, both of them photographed in gorgeous Technicolor by the best cinematographer Corman ever worked with, Nicolas Roeg.

Lush, vibrant, unique ... unforgettable.